


missed calling

by CopperCaravan



Series: Flight [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fera Shepard, Mass Effect 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 15:31:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7690009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of my Flight AU. The Normandy is destroyed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	missed calling

“Jeff.” It’s not hard to tell when Shepard’s scared. Fuck, he’s heard it in her voice often enough and he hates it every time. Something pits in his stomach though; something prickles at the back of his mind, tells him this is worse than all those other times.

“I dunno,” he says, answering the question she didn’t have to ask. Doesn’t look like any ship he’s ever seen. “I dunno what it is.” And they don’t have any time to find out. _Bad._ That’s what it is; that’s all that matters. He flips the comm.—as if a two second warning to strap in or jump out is actually gonna help—and Shepard readies the guns. He’s tempted to tease her ( _got your excitement now, don’t you?_ ) but this is probably not the best time.

There’s a beam of light, Kaidan’s voice in the radio, Shepard cursing beside him, and he can feel it when the damn thing hits—the shake goes into his bones and fuck knows that’s not where it needs to be, not that it needs to be anywhere.

Shepard hits him in the side of the head—the _fuck_ —and before he can tear his eyes away from the other ship to tell her off, his vision shifts, colored over by his oxygen mask. _Goddammit, this is bad. Shit, shit, shit._ And she’s got hers too; got her hands on the controls, her eyes on the screens. She’s ready but _god,_ this is bad.

The pressure in the cabin changes and he can hear it when the field goes up behind him—the little _whirr_ he only recognizes because Shepard insists on weekly safety tests. _Four weeks stuck on this ship in the ass-end of nowhere and still haven’t talked about it, I still haven’t—fuck._ He doesn’t look back. If the ship’s gone, they’re dead; if the ship’s not gone, and he wastes time looking, they’re probably dead.

“Joker.” Kaidan. Radio. That ship’s coming back around and _we’re dead, we’re dead, get it together man, stop fucking up._ “I’m coming to get you guys.”

Before he can say no, before he can say anything, he can hear Shepard, in his radio, at his side, guns still firing but her posture’s all wrong; he can tell without even looking at her. “Negative, Commander. We got four on the engineering deck.”

“Shepard—”

“ _Negative, Commander._ We got this; I got Jeff.”

Kaidan curses and the radio cuts out and with as many hits as Shepard’s getting in, that damn ship’s barely affected at all. And it’s turning around way too fast for him to feel confident about their chances.

“You are _not_ dragging me outta here, Shepard.” Doesn’t take his hands down, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t lose his focus; he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—he’ll kill them. “I finally got this damn ship, I finally got—”

“I won’t.” Her hands are still up, guns still aimed, still shooting; she can’t stop either. “You stay, I stay.” _Christ_ , that sounds like a goodbye. This can’t be it.

“I can _do_ this, Shepard.” _Trust me, trust me—shit, fuck, we’re gonna fucking die._ The ship’s in pieces behind them, he can feel it. The twist and shake and not quite enough gravity, not quite enough heat in the room that’s left. Shit. _Shit._ “I can still save her. I can—”

“You can’t.”

He stops. Whatever the hell that thing is, whoever the hell they are—shit, she’s right but... Her hands are still busy, she’s cursing and even though her oxygen mask’s covering her face, he can see the sheen of sweat on her forehead. They’re gonna die and she knows it and she’s still shooting anyway.

“The Normandy’s going down, Jeff. Whether we’re on it or not.”

Shit, shit, shit. “ _Shit_. Fine. Help me up.”

She’s up like she’d been waiting for it. Probably was and he’ll decide how he feels about that later. Right now all that matters is not getting blown the fuck to pieces. When she pulls him up by his arm, he feels it fracture— _shit, today is not our day_ —but he can’t quite blame her for panicking.

She’s not gentle when she shoves him into the escape pod either and he starts making a list in his head— _fractured wrist, check the left leg, the knee, the ankle, right shoulder_ —he doesn’t think it’s all broken but if they live through this, he’s not real keen on a full body cast. Everything feels like static and his mask is starting to fog up and Shepard’s not _in_ yet. Why the fuck isn’t she in yet? Where the hell did she _go_? This is not how it’s supposed to be.

“Shepard! I’m not—” _I’m not gonna let you get away with breaking half my bones_ , but he can just see the light from this angle—that ship, firing, again—and the whole place shakes, rips, he can feel it falling to pieces like it’s happening in his own body and _Shepard is not in the pod_ and the idea of her death flashes in his mind like it’s already happened, like it’s all already over—her trapped in the ship, floating out in space, cold and breathless and alone and still—and if he weren’t so fucking terrified, he might puke.

“Shepard!” But he can see her now. A box tucked under one arm, the other reaching toward him, toward the door, toward the emergency launch— _You stay, I stay—_ and if his ankle wasn’t busted before, it is when he presses all his weight into it, shoves himself forward and grabs her hand and yanks her into him right before something wrenches loose and the ship’s tearing away from them.

They reach toward the launch button at the same time and when the door’s sealed shut, they get jerked toward the front—too much momentum and not enough fucking safety belts. When they settle, he rips off his mask and takes in the only breath that’s ever fucking mattered.

_We’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive. Holy shit._

“Commander? _Kaidan!_ ” Shepard’s pressing her radio into her ear like if she only listens harder, she’ll hear something other than static. ( _She’s alive, she’s alive, jesus, she’s alive._ ) He reaches toward his own radio— _fuck,_ remembers his wrist is definitely broken—and taps at it with his left hand instead. Nothing. Not from Kaidan, not from Ash, not from Liara. He can’t raise anybody and who knows how far off the other escape pods are by now?

He can still see the Normandy through the tiny window, the ship—what’s left of it—getting smaller every second. Only now, looking at the whole of it, does he realize just how fucked they were. No way he could’ve pulled them out of that, not even if Shepard had taken down that other ship. The other ship that’s nowhere in sight... He’s not sure if that makes him feel better or not. Shepard’s still screaming into the radio—“Ash! Kaidan! _Anybody!_ ”—and he can feel the pain start to hit in his ankle and his shoulder and he decides that yeah, it’s better not to see it. No heavy guns in an escape pod; if they’re gonna die after all that, he doesn’t wanna watch.

“Shepard.” She doesn’t look up. There’s some blood dripping down her face, an ugly cut on her forehead, and she’s still yelling and cursing into her radio. “ _Shepard._ ” He slaps her hands away and it takes a moment for her eyes to focus on his face. “It’s not gonna work.”

The breath goes out of her and her chest seems to cave in, but at least she isn’t screaming now. “Fuck. Fuck, what happened?”

“I—”

There’s a _ping,_ and a light starts blinking above them. “An Alliance vessel has been dispatched to your location. Please remain calm. For your safety—”

Jeff hasn’t been in an escape pod since Flight School but there’s something about that automated voice that’s just as grating as it was back then. Maybe it should be a relief, but it’s not. Shepard starts banging around behind the seats—the seats they didn’t really have time to strap into—and yanks a first aid kit out of a compartment.

“—oxygen masks will deploy from above. Please adjust your own mask before assisting others. In case of—”

“Shut up,” she says, giving one of the seats a kick. “ _Shut up,_ no one _cares._ God.”

It doesn’t shut up, of course, which just makes Shepard more agitated and she keeps muttering under her breath, even when she plops down onto the cramped floor space and starts digging through the kit.

“What’d I break?”

“Shepard there’s nothing in there for broken bones.”

“ _Fuck._ I’m sorry.”

And it hurts, yeah. Hurts like absolute shit, but this isn’t really the kinda situation that... well, it’s not like he’s mad at her. He doesn’t really know what to say, so for a couple seconds they just sit, achy and anxious and aggravated with that stupid automated attendant’s voice repeating her damn speech.

“The blood really brings out the green of your eyes,” he says, after a while, mostly to keep himself from making some other kinda sound, some whiney my-body-fucking-hurts-because-we-broke-it kinda sound.

Her brows pull together and she lifts a finger to her face, dabs at the blood near her eye, like she hadn’t even realized it was there—exactly the sort of shit Shepard would miss. “Huh. Ow.”

“For f—come here.” He doesn’t try to be gentle. He’s much clumsier with his left hand, but even that aside, a nurse he is not. Besides, she’s always making such a big deal about going to ground and getting shot at; if she can’t handle a little (not-so-little) cut on her forehead, he’ll never let her live it down. Especially with him having at least two fractures. Especially not after what they just lived through.

She watches him while he cleans the blood off her face, glances every once in a while toward his right hand, slack in his lap, and his foot, propped off to the side. “Do you think they made it?”

“Yeah.” He does, mostly.

The automated attendant fills the silence (“—your safety, please remain in your seat with your safety belt fastened securely—”) and Shepard watches him while he presses an adhesive bandage to her forehead. When he’s done she doesn’t _stop_ watching him. He can feel his face burning but they’re _alive,_ so who cares?

The way he’d seen her—or thought he’d seen her, or imagined it, or had some god awful vision or something—still and cold and drifting in the wreckage... “You’re alive,” he says.

“I feel like I missed an appointment,” she says, and she laughs a little, nervous because isn’t fucking funny at all. He feels it too.

They both let out a breath and then he remembers: the box.

“What the hell did you go back in there for, Shepard?”

“Oh!” She looks around, leans down to pull it out from under a seat where it’s been lodged with the top half off. “I—it’s nothing.”

“Seriously, Shepard—”

“No, really,” she says, dropping it into her lap. She opens it and he leans over and it really is just _stuff._ Some pictures, a couple protein bars, a few envelopes ( _Tali, Jeff, The Moreaus_ written across the fronts in her scrawly handwriting). He remembers her writing those letters, the night before they hit Ilos, and he hadn’t let himself think about it. But right now, not knowing what his says is practically killing him. She almost died because of it and the goddamn thing almost went with her. “I don’t even know why I—It’s just I remembered it right before I got in and it seemed so important but...”

“I can’t _believe_ you!”

She grabs one of the protein bars—for fuck’s sake, of course it’s fig flavoured—and holds it out to him. “Forgive me?”

Suddenly his wrist and his ankle and his head and his lungs are hurting a hell of a lot more than they were just a second ago. Her out there, miles and miles away from this stupid pod, dying in the black for a fucking protein bar. Christ. “Never in a million years, you ass.”

“Not even if I _feed_ it to you?” She snorts and if he weren’t already busted up, he’d risk it just to hit her.

She drops it back into the box, pushes it off her lap. “I’m sorry we lost the ship, Jeff.”

“Coulda lost a hell of a lot more,” he says, before he’s had time to think better of it. Hell, they still might’ve; no way to know yet who made it off and who... didn’t.

She takes his hand—his _left_ hand—and laces their fingers together and they just wait, that damn recording filling in the space for them. “An Alliance vessel has been dispatched to your location. Please remain calm.”

They’re _alive._ She’s _alive._ They don’t need to say anything.


End file.
